Sardine and White Bean Smash on Sourdough
Ten minutes, a tin, and no cooking at all. The cheapest omega-3 in this collection, and the bones are the reason to buy the tin rather than the fillets.
Ingredients
- 1 tin of sardines in olive oil, about 120g drained — with the bones in
- 240g cooked white beans, cannellini or butter beans, drained
- 2 cloves of garlic, one crushed to a paste with salt
- 1 lemon: zest and juice
- 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
- 2 thick slices of sourdough
- A handful of parsley, chopped
- A few tomatoes, halved, and a little red onion if you have it
- Chilli flakes, black pepper
Method
- Toast the sourdough and rub the cut face of the whole garlic clove over it while it is hot. This takes four seconds and does more than it should.
- Drain the sardines but keep a spoonful of the oil.
- Put the beans in a bowl with the crushed garlic, the lemon zest, half the juice and 1 tbsp of the olive oil. Smash roughly with a fork. Leave it lumpy — blitzed into a purée it becomes hummus, and this is not hummus.
- Add the sardines and the reserved oil, and fold through with two or three strokes. Break the fish up, but do not mash it into the beans.
- Season with pepper, chilli flakes and the rest of the lemon juice. Taste before adding salt; tinned fish is already salted.
- Pile onto the toast, top with the tomatoes, onion and parsley, and finish with the last of the oil.
Why it works
The soft bones in the tin are the part most people tip into the bin, and they are the most valuable thing in it.
Canning softens the skeleton until it disappears into the smash, and it carries calcium in a form that is genuinely absorbed. A tin supplies a meaningful share of a day's calcium, which matters most for women after menopause, when falling oestrogen accelerates bone loss.
Sardines are also a small, short-lived, low-mercury fish, which is what makes them the sensible choice for eating twice a week rather than occasionally. They carry omega-3 and one of the few reliable food sources of vitamin D. At UK latitudes most people run low on vitamin D from October to March; vitamin D receptors are present in the testes, and correcting a real deficiency has been associated with modest improvements in testosterone, though topping up a level that is already adequate has not.
White beans add fibre and slow the meal down, and sourdough does the same job compared with ordinary bread: the long fermentation breaks down some of the starch and produces organic acids that blunt the glucose response.
The lemon is not only for flavour. Vitamin C improves the absorption of the non-haem iron in the beans, which is worth having if periods are heavy: iron deficiency and fatigue.
